Salesforce.com to empower corporate Twitter snooping

Twitter has become Salesforce.com's latest Web 2.0 darling, with a plug-in to the company's customer relationship management (CRM) system.

On Monday the company announced Salesforce.com CRM for Twitter, which it said would let CRM users search, monitor, and "join" conversations and Tweets.

Salesforce CRM for Twitter is due to be made available on the company's AppExchange this summer, starting at $995 per month. You'll get unlimited use for up to 250 customers and be able to set up a contact center with up to five agents.

CRM for Twitter follows Salesforce.com's connectors from its Force.com platform to Amazon Web Services and Facebook last year.

According to Salesforce.com, a company with the CRM software will be able to "capture and monitor the conversation by creating a record in the Service Cloud that tracks the original post and all subsequent replies."

There was no mention of whether those Tweeting could opt out of this service and stop companies like coffee giant Starbucks - user of the Salesforce.com platform for its mystarbucksidea site - from snooping on their Tweets. Judging by the fatty abandon of some, though, this kind of snooping probably won't bother them.

Once your conversation on nipping out for a quick coffee's been hovered up by Starbucks, you can probably then look forward to the coffee giant's marketing goons Tweeting you with some helpful suggestions on the nearest location for that non-fat chai latte.

According to Salesforce, its CRM for Twitter "empowers enterprises to be active participants on Twitter by enabling them to funnel relevant solutions from the Service Cloud knowledge base into a Twitter post, effectively joining the conversation." ®